NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
This software provides the processing for a non-contact system that remotely estimates the heart rate and respiration rate of individuals as they carry on daily activities, and also enables detection of heart and respiration rate through walls.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
Functional connections within the brain can be revealed through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which shows simultaneous activations of blood flow in the brain during response tests. However, fMRI specialists currently do not have a tool for visualizing the complex data that comes from fMRI scans. They work with correlation matrices that table what functional region connections exist, but they have no corresponding visualization.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems have applications in tracking and managing small shipping containers and packages in the commercial supply chain.
Stennis Space Center, Mississippi
Human space systems, such as the International Space Station (ISS) and future planned missions to the lunar surface and beyond, require the crew’s ability to locate and manage the physical resources that are required for use to achieve mission objectives. However, the large number of assets, ranging from expensive, specialized equipment, to food, water, and medical consumables for the crew is an overwhelming management problem. These assets are stored in numerous containers that are sometimes nested within other containers, frequently removed from one container and placed in another location, consumed, and/or used, and then discarded. Additionally, sometimes the containers themselves are moved. The challenge is to track and manage these assets so that the crew can readily locate items and ground controllers can identify when there is a need to provide sufficient resupply for the mission.

Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas
This software tool automates the statistical analysis of heating indicators for a family of trajectories. It allows for quick and clear relative comparison of the trajectories by concisely and meaningfully reducing an arbitrarily large set of body point heating into single values that are used to rank the trajectories. This software is user friendly, and enables other engineers to easily perform analysis. PFlASH post-processes the XF0002 Dump7 files or QLIST to calculate heating indicators and statistics on the heating indicators. PFlASH automatically generates Matlab.m files to produce presentation-quality plots that are ready to be inserted into briefings or collated into a pdf.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
The magnetic sensitivity of a Ka-band isolator’s output phase is measured at 7 × 10–4 deg/G level. This high degree of precision is enabled by the sensitive phase measuring capabilities of a testbed built to mimic NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft. Its ground-based testbed was used to measure the magnetic sensitivity of a flight-spare Ka-band isolator, and the authors found it to be 0.0052 ±0.0007 deg/G along its most sensitive axis. The GRAIL mission was able to incorporate microwave isolators into its instrumentation because the spacecraft orbited the Moon and, thus, did not travel through a permanent magnetic field as it would in a mission around Earth. Understanding this magnetic sensitivity is key to evaluating the impact an isolator would have on data quality for future gravity missions such as GRACE-FO (Gravity Recover and Climate Experiment — Follow On), a scheduled follow-on mission to GRACE, which has been mapping out Earth’s gravity for over a decade.

This work seeks to create libraries that are truly cross-platform, and support hardware from different manufacturers of different generations.
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
New hybrid computing systems consist of a multicore CPU (central processing unit) and one or more massively parallel accelerator devices, such as GPUs (graphics processing units). Effectively utilizing these systems involves using all of the available computational resources, which may be difficult to program. Computing libraries have long existed to alleviate programmer burden and to provide high-performing and tested implementations for common tasks. Unfortunately, the library space is very fragmented, even in cases where the libraries cover similar functionality. In the accelerated computing space, this is compounded by different libraries and manufacturer-specific products that are used, all of which are incompatible with one another. The work described here seeks to overcome much of this burden, by creating libraries that are truly cross-platform, supporting hardware from different manufacturers, of different generations, and of differing levels of parallelism.

Question of the Week

This week's Question: A recent study created by the Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corporation says its life support system could help humans survive on Mars. The proposed Environmental Control and Life Support System, the company says,...